Global Humanist Shoptalk

Punk is a complicated term, because its history has found it appropriated by many different - and often completely contradictory - political movements and societal vantage points. How can so many ideologies fit under one umbrella term? Easily, actually. When "punk" reduces to "resistance from a perceived status quo", all manner of difficult bedfellows might show up to claim the concept as their own.

In this episode, I grapple with a passion that I did not fully understand - but wanted to. What kinds of cultural tension points exist in the world of sneakerheads? What can the phenomenon teach us about societal priorities, and the complex interplay of capitalism and cultural identity formation?

Climate crises require a bigger reframe with respect to how we talk about our relationship to the planet, and the work of prevention as much as crisis management. But do we really need to reinvent the wheel here? Or are there other eras and cultural contexts that already give us what we need to approach the trials ahead?

In this episode, we reflect on the phenomenon of blaming social media for human behaviours that showed up in pre-digital eras, too. It's not that these online tools can't be problematic; it's more that a full accounting of our problems with social media requires an unflinching look at the problems with us.

Is there such a thing as a "pure" science? I'm not immune to the appeal of such a concept, and have sometimes slipped into the fantasy that a noble enough pursuit of knowledge "for the betterment of all humankind" transcends the complexities of human coexistence. Not so, though, as we explore in this episode, on the wonders of astronomy... and also the humanist importance of honouring whatever real-world struggles emerge at the sites of scientific progress.

Consumers sometimes get a bad rap. People making purchases for their families are often trying to do the best they can to juggle value and quality while also being mindful of the most recent social issues news media tells them to prioritize. In this episode, I reflect on some old and new ways in which labeling and company gimmicks to look eco-conscious obscure the deeper problem: the fact that the onus of "being a good citizen" is so often passed on to the end-user, when it's really an industry-scale problem we need to resolve.

A change in cultural context can transform how one thinks about the most innocuous everyday items. That was certainly the case for me with respect to eggs, when I moved from Canada to Colombia and fell into a complete rethink about how our options as consumers and community members are both constructed and constricted by the societies in which we live.

In this episode, we reflect on one of the key indicators of familial wellness and a healthy childhood. It's not money exactly, but it's related! For families living with financial precarity, there is often far less opportunity to create supportive domestic environments, and that strife is felt and borne by the kids involved. If we want to do better by the next generation, we need to start advocating for kids growing up in stable homes--even if that means giving money to people we might think have "made bad choices" to invest in domestic stability.

Sometimes the best way to move forward is to think about how we've responded to issues in the past. In this episode of Global Humanist Shoptalk, I reflect on the early-2000s trend cycle for quinoa as a super-food with key global-activist intersections. The aim isn't to criticize any of us for leaping onto a bandwagon, and then reckoning after the fact with the deeper complexities of any food economy issue. It's to think about how this sort of behaviour is in our nature, and how much trends like the quinoa craze illustrate our willingness to try to do better if the opportunity to do better is made commercially available. What could we do with that knowledge, to build better policy for other crises in the world?

In this episode, we talk about one of the most delicate and vital issues of our time: how we address our mental health crises as a society. While neoliberalism has made a full industry out of wellness, is it really addressing the underlying reasons that so many people are having the same problems coping with our broken world? How can we reframe the problem to arrive at more comprehensive solutions?